Augmented architectural space system for the creation of casual connections with people

In recent years, the increasing social isolation has become a major problem in Japan because of the growing trend toward nuclear families. In addition, further social isolation is concerned caused by a decrease on face-to-face communication opportunities due to the outbreak of the COVID-19 infection. Therefore, it is necessary to create connections among people. On the other hand, opportunities for people to communicate online have increased rapidly. However, various information obtained the face-to-face is missing online, which degrades the quality of communication and causes physical and mental fatigue to users. To solve these problems, this study aims to minimize the gap that exists between online and the face-to-face, and to propose an Augmented Architectural Space that creates casual connections between people within their living space. By comparing the results of impression evaluation experiments using questionnaires for the face-to-face environment, the video conferencing system environment, and the proposed system environment, we demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed Augmented Architectural Space system for creating casual connections between people. © 2023, Association of American Publishers. All rights reserved.

The Impact of Embodiment on Training Effectiveness

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic and compulsory social distancing, researchers in educational fields started to investigate alternatives to face-To-face (F2F) training methods with greater focus, such as video conferencing (VC) and virtual reality (VR) applications. This study investigated the differences between VC, VR and F2F training conditions by evaluating the level of body ownership and agency perceived by trainees. An electrical circuit repair task and multiple surveys were used to gather data from 106 participants in the form of four dependent variables: A circuit knowledge test, task completion rate, number of the subtasks completed by failing participants, and test phase duration. The study included two visits by each participant to measure knowledge retention while there were no training and surveys in Visit 2. Results showed significantly higher circuit learning and knowledge retention scores in F2F and VR conditions than in VC. Also, regarding the retention of knowledge, participants had significantly better knowledge retention in Visit 1 than Visit 2. The authors hope the results of this study enable training developers to enhance the learning process in computer mediated communications. © 2023 IEEE.

Towards a Metaverse Workspace: Opportunities, Challenges, and Design Implications

Both enterprises and their employees have globally experienced remote work at an unprecedented scale since the outbreak of COVID-19. As the pandemic becomes less of a threat, some companies have called their employees back to a physical office, citing issues related to working remotely, but many employees have refused to return. Thus, working in the metaverse has gained much attention as an alternative that could complement the weaknesses of completely remote work or even offline work. However, we do not know yet what benefits and drawbacks the metaverse has as a legitimate workspace, because there are few real cases of 1) working in the metaverse and 2) working remotely at such an unprecedented scale. Thus, this paper aims to identify real challenges and opportunities the metaverse workspace presents when compared to remote work by conducting semi-structured interviews and participatory workshops with various employees and company stakeholders (e.g., HR managers and CEOs) who have experienced at least two of three work types: working in a physical office, remotely, or in the metaverse. Consequently, we identified 1) advantages and disadvantages of remote work and 2) opportunities and challenges of the metaverse. We further discuss design implications that may overcome the identified challenges of working in the metaverse. © 2023 Owner/Author.

Technology, the flipped classroom, and exigent paradigm shifts or being forced into the present

Princeton University, including the various language programs it offers, has intentionally resisted distance learning for decades, primarily out of a desire to concentrate on the residential undergraduate educational experience. In New Jersey, USA, state-level restrictions and institutional decisions resulted in the closure of campus instructional spaces from the halfway point of the 2020 spring semester through the end of the 2020-2021 academic year, with further precautions, mitigations, and flexible responses throughout the following academic year, including but not limited to frequent reversion to remote instruction during periods of high incidence, interior masking requirements, and social distancing when possible in classroom spaces. For the past six years, I have also redesigned, expanded, and aligned our second-year German program with the first year, which is based on a high-frequency core vocabulary and the development of contextual reading strategies, among other approaches (for a detailed description of approach, form, and function, see Oberlin, in press). Of the many tools and approaches considered during this frantic and bewildering week, one stands out: the application of outside-of-class student-to-student communication via Zoom or other video-conferencing technologies with written follow-up to fulfill a number of desiderata: (1) that students speak more in an alternate assignment format given the realities of affective and technological hurdles while using video conferencing software;(2) that they are provided with an unsupervised opportunity to speak in an effort to reduce anxiety;(3) that self-scheduled partner work might offer flexibility necessary during home-based study and the various complications and distractions that entails, particularly during a period of ongoing disruptions;and (4) that a written response to this oral communication would generate classroom discussion, deepen engagement with materials, and present instructors with another avenue for teacher-student feedback and the assessment of sentence- or paragraph-level writing.

Online Threats vs. Mitigation Efforts: Keeping Children Safe in the Era of Online Learning

As the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in school closures since early 2020, children have spent more time online through virtual classrooms using educational technology (EdTech) and videoconferencing applications. This increased presence of children online exposes them to more risk of cyber threats. Here, we present a review of the current research and policies to protect children while online. We seek to answer four key questions: what are the online threats against children when learning online, what is known about children's cybersecurity awareness, what government policies and recommendations are implemented and proposed to protect children online, and what are the proposed and existing efforts to teach cybersecurity to childrenƒ Our study emphasizes the online risks to children and the importance of protective government policies and educational initiatives that give kids the knowledge and empowerment to protect themselves online. © 2023 IEEE.

ZOOMING OUR WAY OUT OF THE FORUM NON CONVENIENS DOCTRINE

The effects of the pandemic have shed light on the evolution of technology in the legal space, including the use of technology in videoconferencing proceedings and facilitating court procedures. Despite the benefits associated with technology, the rapid adoption of videoconferencing proceedings in courts may have unprecedented impacts on the relevance and practicality of the forum non conveniens doctrine. Additionally, the drastically different approaches that federal courts have taken in response to the disproportionate geographic effects of the pandemic may give way to forum shopping. Plaintiffs may be more incentivized to bring their cases to forums that allow for videoconferencing proceedings as a strategic way to circumvent a defendant's potential forum non conveniens argument in a motion to dismiss. This Note argues that videoconferencing technology allows courts to effectively transcend the restrictions of geography while mitigating arguments about the relative convenience of different forums. Creating more uniform rules for videoconferencing proceedings will ensure easier predictability and uniformity in the forum non conveniens analysis. Specifically, this Note recommends that Congress and the courts mandate standardized technological videoconferencing requirements and adopt the original understanding of the forum non conveniens doctrine for lower courts to more explicitly consider the benefits of technology when making a forum non conveniens determination.

"We Speak Visually": User-Generated Icons for Better Video-Mediated Mixed-Group Communications Between Deaf and Hearing Participants

Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, videoconferencing technology has been widely adopted as a convenient, powerful, and fundamental tool that has simplified many day-to-day tasks. However, video communication is dependent on audible conversation and can be strenuous for those who are Hard of Hearing. Communication methods used by the Deaf and Hard of Hearing community differ significantly from those used by the hearing community, and a distinct language gap is evident in workspaces that accommodate workers from both groups. Therefore, we integrated users in both groups to explore ways to alleviate obstacles in mixed-group videoconferencing by implementing user-generated icons. A participatory design methodology was employed to investigate how the users overcome language differences. We observed that individuals utilized icons within video-mediated meetings as a universal language to reinforce comprehension. Herein, we present design implications from these findings, along with recommendations for future icon systems to enhance and support mixed-group conversations. © 2023 ACM.

"I Won't Go Speechless": Design Exploration on a Real-Time Text-To-Speech Speaking Tool for Videoconferencing

The COVID-19 pandemic has shifted many business activities to non-face-to-face activities, and videoconferencing has become a new paradigm. However, conference spaces isolated from surrounding interferences are not always readily available. People frequently participate in public places with unexpected crowds or acquaintances, such as cafés, living rooms, and shared offices. These environments have surrounding limitations that potentially cause challenges in speaking up during videoconferencing. To alleviate these issues and support the users in speaking-restrained spatial contexts, we propose a text-to-speech (TTS) speaking tool as a new speaking method to support active videoconferencing participation. We derived the possibility of a TTS speaking tool and investigated the empirical challenges and user expectations of a TTS speaking tool using a technology probe and participatory design methodology. Based on our findings, we discuss the need for a TTS speaking tool and suggest design considerations for its application in videoconferencing. © 2023 ACM.

Digital spaces of engagement: Perspectives on using zoom and virtual spaces in online classrooms

Understanding how to engage learners in a digital space is a growing issue facing many online instructors. Our interest in digital spaces as sites of engagement results from a pedagogical concern with how Zoom, a commonly used videoconferencing software program, fosters learners' engagement with their new digital tool, with the subject matter of the course, and with their instructor and peers. We assert that Zoom is not just a tool or place of learning but a social space regulating users' interaction that is imbued with their previous experiences, perceptions, and expectations. We examine how online engagement is co-constructed in university classrooms using Lefebvre's (The production of space. Blackwell, 1991) triad of "space" conceptual framework. Using examples from our teaching during the COVID-19 switch to the Zoom learning platform, we explain how different forms of engagement were realized in our English language and Linguistics courses. Our perspectives on using Zoom, with its affordances and challenges, may provide other educators with a practical insight into the various ways in which digital engagement can be facilitated. © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021. All rights reserved.

Dr.'s Eye: The Design and Evaluation of a Video Conferencing System to Support Doctor Appointments in Home Settings

The spread of COVID-19 has encouraged the practice of using video conferencing for family doctor appointments. Existing applications and off-the-shelf devices face challenges in dealing with capturing the correct view of patients' bodies and supporting ease of use. We created Dr.'s Eye, a video conferencing prototype to support varying types of body exams in home settings. With our prototype, we conducted a study with participants using mock appointments to understand the simultaneous use of the camera and display and to get insights into the issues that might arise in real doctor appointments. Results show the benefits of providing more flexibility with a decoupled camera and display, and privacy protection by limiting the camera view. Yet, challenges remain in maneuvering two devices, presenting feedback for the camera view, coordinating camera work between the participant and the examiner, and reluctance towards showing private body regions. This inspires future research on how to design a video system for doctor appointments. © 2023 ACM.

VRChoir: Exploring Remote Choir Rehearsals via Virtual Reality

Choral singing is a creative process that involves continuous, organized, nonverbal communication between conductors and singers. Since the COVID pandemic, choirs are moved to videoconferencing systems for rehearsals. However, the limitation of 2D video interfaces restricts the nonverbal communication, spatial awareness, and sense of presence in choral rehearsal. We designed, implemented, and evaluated VRChoir, a VR-based platform for choir rehearsals to improve these pain points. We evaluated VRChoir with conductors and singers with experience rehearsing in a remote environment. Our findings reveal that VR can be a starting point for improving the sense of presence and quality of non-verbal communication in remote music rehearsals. © 2023 IEEE.

'Keeping our Faith Alive': Investigating Buddhism Practice during COVID-19 to Inform Design for the Online Community Practice of Faith

Supportive digital technologies for the community practice of Faith remain relatively under-explored in Human Computer Interaction (HCI). We report on interviews with 12 members of a Buddhist community in the UK who self-organized and used video-conferencing tools to remain connected to their faith community during the COVID-19 pandemic, aiming to understand how they adopted online tools for their practice while shaping new collective experiences. Findings from Reflexive Thematic Analysis were combined with autoethnographic insights from the first author, also a community member. We evidence qualities of the practice that were valued by participants before and during the pandemic, and the limitations of existing tools and screen-based interactions. We contribute empirical insights on mediated religious and spiritual practice, advancing HCI discourses on Techno-Spirituality, Tangible Embodied Interaction, Soma Design and More-than-Human Worlds. We further develop design considerations for enriching spiritual experiences that are meaningful to practitioners in communities of faith. © 2023 Owner/Author.

Perceptions of pre-service teachers on breakout room micro-teaching with Zoom

Due to the emergence of Covid-19, many educators moved from a face-to-face teaching environment to an online microteaching setting using Zoom. This study explores pre-service teachers' perspectives on microteaching within Zoom's breakout rooms. The authors approached this study from a positivist-postpositivist perspective employing a mixed-methods methodology. The exploratory sequential mixed-method design employed here combines qualitative and quantitative data. Analysis entailed open coding of data from Zoom recordings and statistical analysis of a post-course survey. Convenience sampling of pre-service teachers (PSTs) from a teacher education teaching method course provided the data sets. Findings indicate that microteaching activities within breakout rooms facilitated an environment where pre-service teachers engaged and conversed with peers while developing teaching skills. PSTs valued breakout room interactions, though males and females valued different aspects. Finally, although the findings suggest that microteaching in Zoom's breakout rooms is effective, the findings indicate that the pre-service teachers desired a return to the classroom. This research extends previous research on online microteaching student experiences by providing recommendations regarding microteaching via video conferences.

Teachers' Perceptions of Videoconferencing and Smartphones in a Retrospective Analysis 2009-2020: An Educational Social Internet of Things Framework

Schools have become increasingly influenced by what has been called the Social Internet of Things (SIoT). As many schools transitioned to online teaching and learning in 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic, there is a need to analyze data on technology adoption in schools for changes and continuity since the inception of increasingly popular smartphones since 2007 that has affected videoconferencing, blended learning, and the flipped classroom concept. In this study, videoconference technology is the main factor analyzed in relation to IoT and schools in which handheld devices are considered gateways to further integration of schools into an IoT framework. The researchers analyze a selection of a 2009 dataset and a 2019 dataset from the National Center for Education Statistics (United States) to discuss teachers' perceptions of technology, especially the use of handheld devices and videoconference technology. Recommendations for educator preparation programs (EPPs) are made based on the discussion of the results of this analysis in context with the events of 2020 for why EPPs could emphasize flipped classroom design models within an SIoT framework. © 2023 IEEE.

The Reordering of Everyday Life through Digital technologies During the Covid-19 Pandemic

This paper offers an exploration of everyday life during the Covid-19 pandemic in Bangladesh with a focus on how it has been reordered through commonplace digital technologies and services. We present findings from a qualitative field study. Themes emerging from the findings suggest that digital technologies have been important to the reordering of everyday life during the pandemic: videoconferencing have been instrumental in allowing urban residents to work from home, digital money has enabled workers in rural areas to continue financial transactions, and social media has been a source of news and rumours during the pandemic. However, the benefits of the digital reordering of everyday life are unevenly distributed. The themes emerging are used to frame a discussion of the notion of reordering compared to the concept of resilience within ICTD. © 2022 ACM.

Leveraging Zoom Video-Conferencing Features in Interview Data Generation During the COVID-19 Pandemic

As the COVID-19 pandemic has triggered strict restrictions for traveling and face-to-face meetings, the utilisation of digitally-mediated communication tools to generate interview data in qualitative research during the pandemic was almost inevitable. Employing autoethnography as a research method, this chapter aims to narrate, analyse, and interpret the author's personal experiences generating interview data for a qualitative research project via Zoom video-conferencing during the pandemic. It presents several unique benefits of the use of video-conferencing technology that the author found, as well as some possible challenges that the author anticipated when using the technology. In addition, it also elucidates some distinctive platform-specific features of Zoom video-conferencing that the author utilised to maintain high-quality and secured digital interactions. The information contained in this chapter is significant for researchers who are considering utilising video-conferencing technology, especially Zoom, to generate interview data in the future. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022.

Work in Progress: Benefits of Learning Engineering Sciences to Transition from Face-to-Face to Virtual Learning of Engineering, Technology, and Computing due to COVID-19

For equatorial African countries such as Rwanda the power grid in some regions is either absent or highly unreliable even though these locations are blessed with reliable solar radiation most of the time. Designing and implementing solar power systems capable of supporting micro-computer systems such as Raspberry Pi devices that can be used in educational environments is a way to overcome grid challenges while at the same time imparting valuable lessons covering Engineering, Technology, and Computing. Using Learning Engineering Sciences best practices effectively mitigates how COVID-19 that has required standard face-to-face project and learning strategies to transition to virtual or hybrid strategies that utilize Open Educational Resources (OER). These strategies include video conferencing, file sharing platforms, and messaging applications to generate learning activities, create courses to construct the learning program for training teachers in the use of OER and Raspberry Pi desktop devices. © 2023 IEEE.

Pixelated Participation: A Ph.D. Student's Notes of Online Data Generation During the COVID-19 Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted many aspects of life globally. Similarly, the imposed travel restrictions and border closures in Australia have prevented me from travelling to Indonesia for my Ph.D. fieldwork. Due to this issue, I had to move my interviews, focus groups, and narrative writing online. I conducted my interviews and focus group discussions with English teachers in Indonesia through synchronous platforms such as WhatsApp and Zoom. In addition, I utilised a private Facebook group to facilitate narrative writing activities which were pivotal in my data generation process. Many research studies (see, for example, Archibald et al., 2019;Deakin and Wakefield, 2014;Tuttas, 2015) have documented how online research has afforded both the researcher and participants with flexibility, cost effectiveness, and convenience in a research project with time restraints, geographical distance, and other logistical issues. However, a story about online data generation in the COVID-19 context from a Ph.D. student's perspective remains underexplored. In this autoethnographic account, I will reflect on the process of online data generation in the context of my Ph.D. study. I argue that the online data generation in my research has yielded a "guarded optimism” (Madge and O'Connor, 2004, p. 9) for synchronous online data generation as an equal, rather than secondary option for qualitative research data generation which often uses face-to-face interviews and focus groups as the "gold standard of interviewing” (Hine, 2005, p. 4). Through this story I hope to enrich conversations about the possibilities and challenges of doing online data generation for a Ph.D. study during a global pandemic. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022.

Video Conferencing using WebRTC

Video conferencing has become an essential tool for communication and collaboration in today's world, especially after the recent COVID-19 pandemic. One of the most popular technologies for video conferencing is WebRTC (Web Real-Time Communication), which allows for real-time, peer-to-peer communication directly through web browsers. This study reviews the current state of video conferencing software using WebRTC. In particular, the research study will survey the features and capabilities of popular software solutions and explore the architecture of WebRTC and the protocols used for data transmission in video conferencing software. Additionally, the challenges and limitations of video conferencing for group discussion practice, including technical difficulties, connectivity issues, and privacy concerns are examined. Finally, this study provides recommendations for future research in this field, with the goal of improving the effectiveness and efficiency of video conferencing using WebRTC technology. © 2023 IEEE.

e-Justice: Relating Practical Guidelines in Videoconferencing with the Concerns of Academic Literature

Videoconferencing was widely used in court proceedings during the covid 19 pandemic, and, probably, its use will not return to the point before the pandemic. The academic literature indicates many different concerns with videoconferencing in court proceedings that may ultimately impact the legitimacy of the judicial process. This study aims to appreciate if academic research has been incorporated into the practical recommendations which guide daily work in courts. First, we conducted a literature review to identify and organise the concerns about using videoconferencing in court proceedings. Then we selected two guidelines and evaluated whether their recommendations addressed solutions to concerns raised in the academic literature. We conclude that most of the concerns are present in the guidelines. Although, the concern regarding the difficulty of replicating the environment of the physical courtroom in videoconferencing, which is the most cited concern, is not addressed in the practical guidance. © 2022 Associacao Portuguesa de Sistemas de Informacao. All rights reserved.